Boing Boing

The highly-anticipated Nintendo Switch hits stores on Friday. According to today's reviews, it's got a lot of potential, some of which has yet to be realized even days before launch. From DIGG's Review Roundup:If there's one area where the Switch excels largely (though not entirely), it's as a portable gaming tablet:Though Nintendo marketing seems intent on describing the Switch as a home console that it just so happens you can take with you, I've found myself using the system as a portable much more often than on the TV... The system goes from its power-sipping "standby" to "actively playing a game right where I left off" in about three seconds, making it incredibly easy to pick up and put down as needed. I've highlighted the quality of the Switch's 6.2-inch, 720p screen for portable gaming in previous pieces, and the quality display still stands out after just over a week with the system. (Ars Technica)The controllers are dogged by connectivity issues when not connected to the portable console: The Joy-Con are a nifty idea, though they don’t always work as well as I would’ve hoped. For starters, I simply haven’t found them very comfortable. I find that the buttons are oddly placed and the thumbsticks feel small and overly flippy... I’ve also run into a frustrating issue where the left Joy-Con momentarily loses tracking and stops responding to my inputs... It appears to be an issue with a body part or other object blocking the Joy-Con’s view of the docked console... This should not be an issue for a game controller in 2017, and it’s pretty annoying. (Kotaku) By far the roughest part of Nintendo's rollout of the Switch has been it's online capabilities:What’s it like to set up a Nintendo account online, or migrate your existing account over to Switch? Don’t know. How’s the experience of buying software digitally? Can’t say. What about finding online friends and communicating with them? No idea. Online multiplayer gaming? Haven’t the foggiest. All of these things are quite germane to a review of a piece of personal technology in 2017, but Switch doesn’t do them yet. (Wired)

Why would a savvy Russian billionaire buy a tear-down, mold-infested house from Donald Trump for $100 million, and what does it have to do with newly confirmed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross? In a 20-minute video, Rachel Maddow exposes the shady connections between tens of billions of dollars of international money laundering, Putin's close friends and relatives, crooked banks, Wilbur Ross, and Donald Trump. The fact that Republicans in Congress have blocked every attempt to open an investigation into Trump's ties to Russian money laundering makes them complicit in the ongoing coverup.Watch video here.Previously: New secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross has ties to illicit Russian finance

La Rambla is one of the world's most challenging sport climbs, and 19-year-old Margo Hayes made it while on a study break from school. (more…)

Wireless headphones aren't a mind-bending thing anymore now that Apple made them the standard thing-to-be-outraged-over-in-the-new-iPhone fare, thereby killing the cool factor. But let's be reasonable here. Wires really are a pain when you're running, trying to get off the bus, or even just standing up from your desk. Wireless headphones make sense, they just don't always sound great. FRESHeBUDS is shifting the paradigm, however, with their Air Bluetooth 4.1 headphones.Bluetooth 4.1 delivers crisper, clearer sound in the Airs, eliminating the spots and static that plague a lot of other wireless headphones. Their weather- and sweat-proof design are conducive to wearing in the rain or beneath the shameful amounts of sweat you expel on a run. You can even take calls on them when somebody gives you a reason to stop.The FRESHeBUDS Air Bluetooth 4.1 Earbuds are currently 72% off at just $24.95.Explore other Best-Sellers in our store:Coding + DevelopmentLearn to Code 2017 Bundle (Pay What You Want)DIY ComputerRaspberry Pi (63% off)Project ManagementUltimate Project Management Certification ($69)

On Monday, March 6 at 10AM, I'll be participating in a non-partisan R-Street event on "Property Rights in the Digital Age," with participants from the Heritage Foundation, R-Street, the Open Technology Institute, and Freedomworks: "As we enter an age near total connectivity, we must ask ourselves, are our laws keeping up with technology? Do we need to rewrite the rules to preserve our traditional notions of property, or embrace the brave new world of licensing everything?" (RSVP)

Six thousand musicians entered NPR's Tiny Desk Concert competition, but this year's unanimous winner was Tank and the Bangas for this delightful jam. (more…)

After a wave of anti-semitic attacks swept America, Donald Trump convened a meeting of state Attorneys General, and repeated a conspiracy theory posted hours before to a neo-Nazi website that suggested that Jews had perpetrated the attacks as a false-flag operation to make the Trump administration look bad. (more…)

Celestine Omin is a Nigerian software engineer who works for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's company Andela, founded to give talented African coders an entree into the leading American tech firms; this week, he flew to the USA on a B1/B2 visa to meet with the company, but he found himself detained at the border. (more…)

One of the products that Snapchat owner Snap Inc. is developing as “a modern-day camera company” is a drone, reports the New York Times today. Sources for this bold claim are “three people briefed on the project who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential.” The drone would help users take videos and photographs from overhead, then share that visual data with Snap, and presumably, other users of the service.Snap is scheduled to go public later this week in a long-anticipated IPO. (more…)

After Bloomberg News published a video of Travis Kalanick being a total dick to an Uber driver who complained about how poorly Uber drivers are paid, the Uber CEO and co-founder issued a sorry-ish, apology-ish public statement. (more…)

President Trump wants to dox all the brown people. (more…)

Mondo Tees has announced a line of Aliens xenomorph tiki mugs, ("in space, no one can hear you drink"), available for pre-order now with ship dates this summer (some glazes only available at Alamo Drafthouses). (more…)

My wife started giving me Calvin Klein boxer briefs for gifts a while ago, and now they are my favorite. No weird tags or seams to irritate my tender skin, and the elastic doesn't wear out and create the droopy drawers effect. Amazon has a sale on a 2-pack for $17.

Here's a live video of fiery Mount Etna, on the east coast of Sicily, Italy. The tallest and most active volcano in Europe erupted Monday night, and its pulsing, spewing flames are stunning - and hypnotic. Who needs a lava lamp when you've got the real thing?

Looks just like the Apple Store.

Scientists conducting research into hearing loss have come across a compound the regenerates cochlear hair cells, which could lead to a cure for certain kinds of deafness.From C&EN:The snail-shell-shaped cochlea of the inner ear contains some 15,000 hair cells that are needed for humans to hear. Audiologist dogma holds that once these cells die off, they never grow back, leading to hearing loss.But a new study suggests that hair cell death may not be as immutable as it seems. Scientists from Harvard, MIT, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary have discovered a mixture of molecules that can dramatically reverse hair cell loss in the cochleas of mice.

You might say they have a nose for it.

For 200 years the U.S. Treasury has maintained a "conscience fund" that accepts repayments from people who have defrauded or stolen from the government. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the history of the fund and some of the more memorable and puzzling contributions it's received over the years.We'll also ponder Audrey Hepburn's role in World War II and puzzle over an illness cured by climbing poles.Show notesPlease support us on Patreon!

The Drug Stashes subreddit is nothing but photos of people's impressive recreational drug collections. I don't know what most of the drugs in these photos are, but they are very nicely packaged.

I have not seen this painting before. It's called Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan on 16 November 1581, and was completed in 1885 by Ilya Repin.Warped Perspective has an article by Keri O'Shea on the painting:It took three centuries before this scene was committed to canvas with the gravitas and horror it deserved. The man who proved himself able is arguably Russia’s best-known painter, certainly its best-known Realist painter. That man was Ilya Yefimovich Repin, who returned to historical painting in 1885 to complete ‘Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan’. It is to my mind one of the most haunting pieces of art ever created.The differences between the Realist style used here and the idealised, unrepresentative portraiture of the day is exaggerated hugely by the savagery of this piece. Repin chose to paint the exact moment of Grozny’s revelation; the awful moment of stillness after the manslaughter of his heir. The two men, one living, one dead, are presented alone in a room whose fire-lit warmth gives the lie to the scene and its circumstances. That warmth, and its crimson finery is ironically juxtaposed with the blood on young Ivan’s head, which is the brightest red here, and the rich, geometric-patterned drapery in the background forms another contrast with Ivan’s curved, inanimate body, fading into nothingness before the grisly focus of the scene. There is evidence of a struggle; furniture is upended, and Ivan’s leg has disarrayed the silk rug beneath their feet – but now all is still. Horribly, terribly still.However, for all of that, it is Grozny’s haunted expression which retains its capacity to shock. His wide eyes stare into nothing, he is lost in his thoughts; those eyes contrast utterly with the now unseeing eyes of his son. There is a lone tear on young Ivan’s cheek, as he is cradled in death by his now-penitent father, Grozny’s hands clasped ineffectually to the fatal wound. Even knowing the circumstances of this crime, I find Grozny’s expression deeply moving. To my mind, it seems like a Realist take on the Goya painting ‘Saturn Devouring His Son’ – the same blank expression, the same desperation, the same destruction of one’s young. It also creates something which often features in horror – sympathy for the monster, regardless of their deeds. This disturbing image has shocked many through the years; not least, in 1913, when Grozny’s face was badly slashed by a man called Abram Abramovich Balashov. Balashov was removed from the scene shouting, “Enough blood! Down with blood!”

The Signal Sidearm is a sensor designed to be fitted to a police pistol holster: when triggered, it wirelessly signals all nearby police bodycams to go into record-and-archive mode. It's made by Axon, the bodycam division of Taser International. (more…)

SB 1142 is a bill introduced last week in the Arizona Senate that would allow the cops to charge participants in demonstrations with racketeering -- and confiscate their assets, including their homes -- if they attended a protest that turned violent, even if they did nothing violent and were not involved in planning any violence. (more…)

As a child, writer Lisa Hix visited Silver Dollar City, a surreal theme park in the Ozark Mountains that I have been fortunate enough to experience myself. Like me, Lisa was enchanted with the nutty dark ride Fire In The Hole and its story of people in creepy devil-horned hoods who torched a town. No, they weren't KKK members but rather the Bald Knobbers, a 19th century vigilante group. Over at Collectors Weekly, Lisa explores the history of the Bald Knobbers:Though they never lit a town on fire—that part of the ride is completely invented—the real story of their rise is a terrifying parable about what happens when government fails and violence reigns. It’s a lesson that’s perhaps more relevant in the political climate of 2017 than Americans would like it to be.When I called Dr. Matthew J. Hernando, a professor at Ozark Technical College and author of Faces Like Devils: The Bald Knobber Vigilantes in the Ozarks, he told me that “Fire in the Hole”—which he has ridden many times—“is basically a bunch of nonsense.” For the real story of the Bald Knobbers, Hernando explained, you have to look at southwest Missouri’s peculiar history. In a region where the Civil War had laid waste to the rule of law, ne’er do wells like the notorious James-Younger Gang and vigilante groups like the Bald Knobbers emerged to fill the void of authority. Admirers saw them as righteous folk heroes; adversaries regarded them as murderous thugs.

"Alex Jones Is Definitely a Human and Not a Reptilian."

Adam Savage visits with Weta Workshop's Richard Taylor for a glimpse of the mecha-geisha masks, animatronic amazement, and far-out fabrication that brought the new Ghost in the Shell film to life. Directed by Rupert Sanders and starring Scarlett Johansson and Pilo Asbaek, Ghost in the Shell hits theaters in a month. Trailer below. (Tested)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRkb1X9ovI4

"Julia" is a 16-year-old Canadian high school student who "leans right" on economics and foreign policy, and is generally disgusted with the conservative movement's pivot to reactionaries like Milo Yiannopoulos who trade in "anti-Muslim, anti-feminism, and general bigotry." (more…)

Markets don't solve all our problems, but they sometimes produce remarkably efficient systems for producing and distributing goods, and the internet traded on that promise with marketplaces like Ebay (anyone can sell, anyone can buy); Google (anyone can publish, anyone can read), and Amazon (one marketplace where all goods are transparently priced and ranked). (more…)

Canada's tar sands -- rebranded in this century as "oil sands" -- are the source of some of the world's filthiest and most expensive oil, which can only be extracted by burning tons of already-refined oil to boil tons of sand, producing a product that sells at a global discount because it is so adulterated. (more…)

There's carry-on and checked baggage, but what do you call luggage that weighs 506 tons, including two Mercedes limousines and two elevators? It's just a nine-day trip to Indonesia, but Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdul Aziz isn't leaving any of his creature comforts behind. According to the Washington Post:The Saudi royal is expected to bring 459 metric tonnes (506 U.S. tons) of cargo with him on his trip — including two Mercedes-Benz s600 limousines and two electric elevators... The Jakarta Post reports that the Saudi group will total about 1,500 people, including 10 ministers, 25 princes and at least 100 security personnel.But apparently this isn't excessive, relatively speaking.While the Saudi king's colossal cargo hold may seem large, it is not necessarily out of scale with other world leaders. When President Barack Obama visited sub-Saharan Africa in 2013, he was accompanied by 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines, and hundreds of U.S. Secret Service agents tasked with helping secure locations in Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania.It'll be the first time in 46 years that the King has traveled to Indonesia, and with that kind of packing checklist, it's a wonder he travels at all.

When I saw that the cell phone designed for rectal smuggling was called "Beat the Boss," I assumed "The Boss" was a synonym for "The Man," but it turns out it's a reference to a specific product: Xeku's Body Orifice Security Scanner (BOSS), a "hygienic cavity search" chair that scans prisoners for rectal contraband. (more…)

In 1958 in an Illinois creek bed, an amateur fossil collector named Francis Tully discovered the fossilized remains of a bizarre creature that resembled a mollusk, insect, and worm yet was none of those things. Since then, thousands of 300 million-year-old fossilized "Tully Monsters" have turned up and the creature was officially named as the Illinois state fossil. (more…)

Freak out to this insanely weird "Punching A Nazi" song and video by cyberdelic pioneer RU Sirius's Trippin' Coyotes/Creosote Cowboy! Performed by R.U. Sirius, Charlie Verrette, and Acatelysteleven. Musical Production: Daddy Phriday & Creosote Cowboy; Video by Daddy Phriday; with vocals from Cate Meiers Leggett; lyrics by R.U. Sirius (w. help from Acatelysteleven)More insanity at the band's Bandcamp page.

r/gatekeeping is a subreddit dedicated to collecting and mocking examples of gatekeeping in popular culture and fandom: the act of telling you you aren't allowed to like something unless you meet arbitrary or esoteric requirements. Reading some of them makes me think that the "gatekeeping urge" is so fundamentally primal and dumb that gatekeeping call-outs could easily be generated by a computer program to a Poe-complete level.

SA Metro is a set of keys for mechanical keyboards that form colored subway lines in the classic style of the London Underground map. Three editions are planned, covering staggered, gridded and ergonomic keyboard layouts; to be absolutely clear, it lacks standard legends. If it gets enough votes at Massdrop, it will be manufactured by Signature Plastics.

https://twitter.com/DougieStew/status/835845404734414848In honor of America's appreciation for Britons' intellectual and cultural sophistication, I hereby present this video of some of them enjoying a bagel on a train. Posted by Dougie Stew, it has the dimensions of an epic drama, with a call to action, a threshold guardian, a journey to the cave, and a hero returning clad in the golden fleece. It has everything.

Last October, floods of traffic from Internet of Things devices infected by the Mirai worm brought down several high profile internet services, from Level 3 to Dyn to Twitter and Reddit. (more…)

It's the narration of two gentlemen (Spencer Laboda and his father) who record and comment upon this incident in which a crew of construction workers improvise a series of tactics (some very unwise ones included!) to recapture, a spinning, potentially lethal concrete polisher on a jobsite that really makes this work. Laboda notes, "nobody was injured... we bought lunch for some of the participants. This was a great construction crew and they built a magnificent facility for us to enjoy every day." (via Wil Wheaton)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BKgTh5VpT4After his awkward endorsement of pedophilia disqualified Milo Yiannopoulos to be the hard right's token gay pal, CPAC needed a new speaker to fill his slot their conference, and the guy they chose was Jikido 'Jay' Aeba, a member of the notorious Japanese "Happy Science" cult, who helped the religion extrude a tendril into the political realm by founding the Happiness Realization Party. (more…)

dj BC writes, "In 2006 I mixed a bunch of New Orleans artists with Wu Tang rappers to make the record 'Wu Orleans.' 11 years later, here's part two, with ten new songs. Free MP3 download of both albums here. A very limited run of vinyl with all 20 Wu Orleans songs on two records, and new art, is allegedly coming on record store day in April. Here's the video for 'Express Your Brain, Champ' with Ghostface Killah, Nicky Da B (via Diplo), Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and dj BC. Laissez les bon temps roulez!"

DJI is the world's leading designer and producer of easy-to-fly drones and aerial photography systems. If you're a drone enthusiast, you want a DJI. If you know absolutely nothing about drones and think they're weird, if you win a DJI you're going to become a drone enthusiast.Enter this giveaway (for free, yes) and you'll get a shot at winning either a DJI Phantom 4 Pro, or a DJI Mavic, two of the best drones on Earth. Or, well, hovering one hundred feet above it. You get the point.The Phantom 4 Pro is equipped with a 1", 20MP sensor capable of shooting 4K/60fps video and Burst Mode stills at 14fps, which is drone and cinematography talk for such dang good picture that you'd be foolish not to submit to National Geographic. The Mavic, meanwhile, boasts a similar 4K stabilized camera, but is considerably more portable than the Phantom. If you're a climber or often find yourself in remote places, this one's your buddy.Regardless, you're getting a top of the market drone for free. All you have to do is enter by March 6, and cross your fingers you win.

Meyer Lansky was an infamous and ruthless gangster -- albeit one so personally charming that his life is chronicled in a book called But He Was Good to His Mother -- and no friend of New York State Judge Nathan Perlman; nevertheless, as the Nazi-supporting German-American Bund staged more and more toxic rallies in New York City, Perlman quietly asked Meyer to form a squad of Jewish gangsters to disrupt their meetings. (more…)

Jonathan Stray summarizes three different strains of propaganda, analyzing why they work, and suggesting counter-tactics: in Russia, it's about flooding the channel with a mix of lies and truth, crowding out other stories; in China, it's about suffocating arguments with happy-talk distractions, and for trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, it's weaponizing hate, outraging people so they spread your message to the small, diffused minority of broken people who welcome your message and would otherwise be uneconomical to reach. (more…)

Back in 2014, Google announced Project Ara, a click-in/click-out modular concept-phone that you could customize by adding or removing modules as you saw fit. (more…)

Indie news outlet Techdirt is being sued for $15M by Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email in 1978, eight years after Ray Tomlinson sent an email over ARPANET; Ayyadurai is represented by Charles Harder, a key figure in the Gawker-killing legal campaign that Peter Thiel financed, and who is also representing Melania Trump in her $150m lawsuit against The Daily Mail. (more…)

Somehow, the guy who runs YouTube's Hydraulic Press Channel got hold of some adamantium, the fictional metal alloy fund in Wolverine's skeleton and claws.

Felix Sater has longstanding ties to the Trump Organization. In 2010 Sater carried a business card identifying him as a senior advisor to Trump. He's quite a colorful fellow. From today's article in The Daily Beast:Felix Sater is an immigrant who did prison time for stabbing a man in the face with the broken stem of a margarita glass, and he would surely qualify for the label “bad hombre” were he from Mexico instead of Russia.It was only by becoming a federal informant that Sater avoided an otherwise 20-year mandatory term for a $40 million fraud in which most of the victims were elderly, a number of them Holocaust survivors. The Russian-born Sater has popped up in the news again recently when the New York Times reported that Sater was involved in hand-delivering a sealed proposal to Michael T. Flynn (who has not yet resigned as national security adviser) "outlining a way for President Trump to lift sanctions against Russia."From the Daily Beast:The plan is said by the Times to involve Russia’s withdrawal from Ukraine and a referendum on the fate of occupied Crimea: namely, whether or not the peninsula, which Russian forces seized almost bloodlessly in 2014, would be “leased to Russia for a term of 50 or 100 years” Artemenko reportedly insists that their peace proposal has met with approval among senior aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin.Sater did not respond to a request for an interview with The Daily Beast. He was quoted elsewhere denying that he had been engaged in actual diplomacy. He did tell Fox News that the effort is just his latest contribution to his adopted land.“What could be wrong in helping stop a war and trying to achieve peace?” he said. “I have done so much for my country and thought that promoting peace was a good thing.”Trump has said in interviews (see above video) that he hardly knows Sater and wouldn't recognize Sater if he were in the same room with him, but Sater and Trump have been photographed together numerous times and Sater has traveled with Trump and his children. From The American Interest:Sater has also testified under oath that he had escorted Donald Trump, Jr. and Ivanka Trump around Moscow in 2006, had met frequently with Donald over several years, and had once flown with him to Colorado.As for the man Sater stabbed in the face with the broken margarita glass in 1991? Wikipedia says Sater "stabbed the man's cheek and neck with the stem of a margarita glass, breaking his jaw, lacerating his face, and severing nerves. Sater was convicted of first degree assault in 1993 and served a year in prison."To quote Trump from his 1990 book, Surviving at the Top, "I’ve always been blessed with a kind of intuition about people that allows me to sense who the sleazy guys are, and I stay far away.”

Two CBP officials boarded a Delta flight from New York to SFO after it landed on Wednesday and demanded that passengers show government-issued "documents" before they would be allowed to debark. (more…)